I look forward to the day when the first sentence describing a Supreme Court nominee isn’t “the fourth woman to be nominated…” every time a woman is nominated for a high profile position like Supreme Court Justice. If it were a man, they wouldn’t start the report by saying “the 110th man to be nominated.” They’d find some other descriptor (political leanings, race, or maybe religion) to lead off that report.
Unfortunately, nominating a woman to the Supreme Court is still the lead in the story because there are so few women in any profession at that level. Therefore, it IS still news. I look forward to the day when enough women fill ALL top positions in this country that their presence in those positions is not news. We have had, and continue to have, many first female this or that announcements, which is progress, but it isn’t enough. Not yet.
When I was a child, my mother told me stories about how she, as one of only two women in her University of Oklahoma business school class, struggled to be taken seriously as an accountant in the early 1960’s. Many times, she told me how she faced countless hiring managers who told her flat-out that they didn’t hire women accountants, but she could apply for a job in their secretarial pool. When she finally found a manager willing to hire her, she had to work for two years before her raises equaled starting pay for men in her position. At the time, I believed that while she was telling me how hard it was then, she was also explaining how much easier my life would be because those days were history. Of course, life isn’t nearly that simple.
Today it is starkly clear to me that my generation – Generation X – is part of the continuing transition our society is making from a male-domination in all things to the equality our grandmothers and mothers first demanded back in the 1960’s. I naively hoped when I was a kid that we would be the generation for whom equality would simply exist, but I’ve been in the workforce long enough to know we still have a very long way to go. As a woman in a male-dominated profession, I see that stark reality every day as women fill the lower ranks, but get stuck in middle management. Men – at least in corporate finance – still seem to prefer to promote and hire men into senior management positions. Corporate finance is perceived as a power profession, and men still rule the world, unfortunately.
I think if you asked most men my age, they’d tell you that equality exists now. They don’t see the gender differences in workplace hiring and promotions, but women do. Women notice everything, discuss it with each other, and try to encourage each other to be stronger and more aggressive self-advocates in the work place, but we still haven’t found a way to break through that cracked ceiling. We learned long ago not to complain because men don’t believe women when they bring up the subject of workplace inequality. Men of all ages seem to truly believe there is no problem; they are naïve or blind when it comes to their dominance of the workplace and their very painful dismissal of women as equals.
I also understand ever better with each passing year why some of my friends got out of this profession once they reached a certain level and saw the Sisyphean task ahead. Some stayed home to be Moms then directed their skills into consulting. Others changed careers or started their own businesses. I don’t blame them, but I do envy them because they had both the courage and the spouse’s salary that helped fund that transition from corporate careers to that other fulfilling professional life they created for themselves. It is much harder to make that sort of change if you are the only income in your home, so it takes much longer to make that transition. While we toil away in our free time to create new opportunities for ourselves, we grin and silently bear the pain at work. That’s what we women have been trained to do, but it isn’t good for us, or for the generations that follow us.
We need to educate everyone – men and women – so that women are taken seriously as equals in ALL professions. That means respecting stay-at-home Dads as much as we do stay-at-home Moms. That means NOT glorifying 70 hour work weeks so that parents (Moms AND Dads) can have a career and be a good parent to their children. The fundamental cultural shift we need is for everyone to support work-life balance for ALL people in the work force, not just for a few. Deciding to have that balance shouldn’t be a career-killer, just as being a woman shouldn’t thwart career advancement.
I hope that a dozen years from now, when my eldest niece enters the workplace, she and her younger brother and sister after her, will have real equality and work-life balance.
